Humor demands an immediate audience response, but both the initiating move and the response take place in a context where each party is aware that they are being observed (and their actions judged) by the other. Further, ...

Research into the acoustics of laughter shows that it is extremely variable (e.g. Chafe 2007; Ruch and Ekman 2001). However, I am aware of no experimental research into laughter that takes a cross-cultural comparative ...

Jokes are not just about being funny or arousing pleasure. Beneath the humor frame’s cloak of non seriousness, some serious and far-reaching epistemological work is going on. In his Redeeming Laughter, Peter Berger argues ...

Elliott Oring once stated that some jokes are beautiful— a statement that at first blush seems either absurd or revolutionary. But if it seems revolutionary to apply aesthetic approaches to verbal jokes, practical jokes ...

In this paper I will explore the reception of jokes. I will use practical jokes as examples but my intent is to make claims about the reception of verbal jokes as well. I contend that joke reception arises from the interplay ...

For the last century, New Zealand university students have celebrated graduation with popular and satirical variety shows. For many years, every show included a male ballet. Once very well-known and loved, the male ballet ...

Does anything go in humor? My answer is, yes, potentially, anything goes. Does that mean there are no limits in humor? Not at all. Humor depends upon boundaries—if there were no limits, there would be no humor. I contend ...